Informing Management of Waterfowl Harvest in a Changing Climate

The ability to effectively manage wildlife in North America is founded in an understanding of how human actions and the environment influence wildlife populations. Current management practices are informed by population monitoring data from the past to determine key ecological relationships and make predictions about future population status. In most cases, including the regulation of waterfowl hunting in North America, these forecasts assume that the relationships we observed in the past will remain the same in the future. However, climate change is influencing wildlife populations in many dynamic and uncertain ways, leading to a situation in which our observations of the past are poor predictors of the future. If managers continue [...]